Now the Republican’s henchmen are stamping out any mention of it at all in the Sunshine State. His administration has banned any use of the terms “climate change” and “global warming” for official state business, the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting revealed in early March.

While Scott openly questions whether climate change is occurring, he denies he’s muzzling his staff. But stories of Florida state workers and contractors getting the brunt of this censorship make his denial ring hollow.

Some of them earn — or used to earn — their living grappling with the manifestations of global warming. After all, Florida faces grave climate risks since it’s low-lying and surrounded by the sea.

Take environmental attorney Chris Byrd. He lost his job in 2013 over this climate gag rule and later blew the whistle on it.

Or Barton Bibler. When the Florida Department of Environmental Protection employee ran afoul of Scott’s shushing, he was suspended without pay and ordered to undergo a mental health evaluation.

Bibler’s trouble began when he expressed concern over the Keystone XL pipeline’s climate impact and included the term “climate change” in the minutes of a meeting where state officials discussed, you guessed it, climate change.

Scott’s linguistic crackdown is so wide-ranging that the Florida health department recently censored a research paper on the relationship between climate change and ciguatera, a food-borne illness you can get from eating apparently healthy fish that turn out to be toxic.

Florida’s governor isn’t the only leader clamming up about climate change.

President Barack Obama may have just signed an executive order that will shrink the federal government’s carbon footprint. But the very next day, Uncle Sam tried to gloss over a climate problem when the Interior Department revealed overdue new fracking guidelines.

Environmentalists instantly panned the Obama administration’s effort to somehow make drilling for oil and gas via hydraulic fracturing on public and Native American lands “safe” and “responsible.”

Seriously? Fracking plunders fresh water supplies. It injects toxic chemicals into the ground and exposes people who live near fracking sites to cancer-causing benzene fumes. Fracking releases methane, a gas that’s even more climate-morphing than carbon dioxide. It invites earthquakes.

Safe fracking is as laughable as safe heroin.

What about international climate talks? Surely those global efforts spell out what needs doing?

Hardly. Humanity is cooking the planet by burning massive amounts of oil, gas, and coal. Yet no climate pact to date has zeroed in on this simple fact. As Guardian columnistGeorge Monbiot recently noted, “you cannot solve a problem without naming it.”

With apologies to the late comedian Joan Rivers, I have a question for Florida, the Obama administration, and those legions of climate negotiators brushing up on their French ahead of their big meeting in Paris: Can we talk?

About climate change. And fossil fuels. Life as we know it won’t be possible unless most of the remaining oil, gas, and coal reserves stay in the ground.

This isn’t just semantic monkey business.

Even if it pains bureaucrats to boss corporations around, there’s no fixing the climate without burning less oil, gas, and coal. Unless they run out of customers first, the fossil fuel industries won’t switch to cleaner alternatives until governments give them no choice.

The Washington Post reported on Saturday that Hillary Clinton’s brother, Tony Rodham, is on the advisory board of a company that is trying to mine gold in Haiti. No one should be judged based on decisions made by family members, but here is why Hillary Clinton is in the middle of this story and needs to act quickly.

Tony Rodham met VCS Mining’s chief executive, Angelo Viard, in 2012 at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), part of the Clinton Foundation, where Hillary serves on the Board of Directors. Viard admitted to the Post that he paid the $20,000 entry fee to the Initiative because he thought he could drum up business deals. It’s not clear from the Post story whether Tony Rodham also paid an entry fee for himself, but the meeting between the two delivered a potential financial bonanza for Rodham. As a board member, he holds stock options that will become extremely valuable if the mine comes on line.

There are two problems here. The first is that the Clinton Global Initiative’s integrity is tarnished when some corporate executives are drawn to it out of profit motives rather than charitable ones. Viard told the Post he attended as “a pure marketing operation.”

And here is the other problem. Both Bill and Hillary Clinton seem to genuinely care about Haiti. Indeed, Haiti is a major focus of the Clinton Foundation. But gold mining is one of the worst choices Haiti could make given the environmental nightmares it breeds.

Industrial mining uses vast quantities of water, which Haiti no longer has. Mining firms also use cyanide to separate gold from the surrounding rock, which can escape into the surrounding soil and water during earthquakes or storms and wreak havoc. (Remember Haiti and earthquakes?) And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of environmental and social and human rights problems that come with gold mining.

Haiti and El Salvador share the distinction of being the most environmentally compromised countries in the hemisphere. Communities in gold country in El Salvador have risen up to oppose mining and have persuaded their government to stop issuing mining permits for close to a decade. Opposition to gold mining is also spreading in Haiti, which has a long history with gold. Recall that Christopher Columbus’s thugs cut off the hands of the original inhabitants of Haiti over 500 years ago when they didn’t bring in their required quota of gold. Today’s equivalent of getting your hand cut off is to be poisoned by cyanide.

This would be my advice to the presidential hopeful: State clearly that you understand gold mining is environmentally destructive and that you understand it would be a disaster in Haiti. The Haitian Senate has opposed this project, so you can simply support their statements.

Second, state that as president you will oppose trade agreements that allow mining companies to sue governments that are putting checks on gold mining. The big trade agreements that President Obama is negotiating with Pacific nations and with Europe contain chapters that allow corporations to file claims against governments over actions—including health, safety and environmental measures and regulations—that reduce the value of their investment. Tragically, right now, gold mining firms (Oceana Gold and Infinito Gold) are suing the governments of El Salvador and Costa Rica for hundreds of millions of dollars for putting checks on gold mining.

When Hillary Clinton had to issue a statement on the last kerfuffle—the one over her personal email account—she chose the UN Security Council as the venue. The UN would be a good place to try to clear up this controversy as well. But, unlike the last PR flop, this time she shouldn’t wait a week to speak out.

http://www.ips-dc.org/advice-for-hillary-clinton-on-her-brothers-bad-judgment/feed/0Jim Crow in the Holy Landhttp://www.ips-dc.org/jim-crow-in-the-holy-land/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=jim-crow-in-the-holy-land
http://www.ips-dc.org/jim-crow-in-the-holy-land/#commentsWed, 25 Mar 2015 19:23:07 +0000Phyllis Bennishttp://www.ips-dc.org/?p=37356The last days of the campaign sounded an awful lot like the Jim Crow South, when African Americans had officially won the right to vote but still faced massive discrimination.

On election morning, a powerful white official running for re-election urged his followers to get out and vote, warning that minority voters were turning out in large numbers — and those trouble-making civil rights agitators, he complained, were busing them to the polls.

But this wasn’t Mississippi or Alabama circa 1965. It was Israel in 2015.

And the candidate wasn’t some protégé of Bull Connor or George Wallace shouting into a bullhorn. It was Israel’s prime minister writing on his Facebook page.

Naked Racism

The leader of Washington’s closest Middle East ally — the storied “only democracy in the Middle East” — was pushing his right-wing supporters to get out and vote. “The right-wing government is in danger,” he warned, because — in his words — “Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left-wing organizations are busing them out.”

The naked racism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s last-minute electioneering was repellent. But more horrifying was the fact that it worked.

The language aimed to frighten right-wing Israeli Jewish voters with the specter of a large turnout among the Palestinians who make up 20 percent of Israeli citizens. The gambit brought back to Netanyahu’s Likud Party the far-right voters who otherwise might have voted for one of the even more extreme right-wing parties.

It worked. Likud trumped its challengers from the right as well as the left, and Netanyahu swept to victory.

Of course, there were other ploys to reach extreme-right voters as well. Netanyahu’s last-minute promise that he would oppose the creation of a Palestinian state — seemingly reversing a position he’d laid out several years earlier — may have been shocking to many in the United States. But it was actually consistent with the prime minister’s longstanding behavior.

As far back as 2001, Netanyahu bragged that he “actually stopped the Oslo Accord,” the diplomatic framework that was supposed to give rise to a Palestinian state. For the last six years, with one brief and ineffectual freeze, Netanyahu has led successive Israeli governments in building new settlements in the West Bank, “Judaizing” occupied Arab East Jerusalem, and attacking Gaza with brutal and illegal force — all with the intended effect of derailing any possibility of even a rump Palestinian state, let alone one that would be independent, viable, and contiguous.

Netanyahu attempted to dial back his reversal after the election. But given the prime minister’s consistent opposition to ending the occupation, President Obama should reject that lie.

Rethinking Old Assumptions

Indeed, the challenge for the Obama administration now is not how to rebuild its frayed relationship with Netanyahu, or even its relationship with Israel writ large. That relationship has been way too special for far too long, and it needs to be brought down to normal size.

In the past few years, we’ve seen Israel continue to act in violation of human rights, in violation of international law, and in direct contravention of the very values that it claims to share with the United States — unless those values happen to concern a continuing legacy of racism toward indigenous peoples and others outside the majority demographic.

Unfortunately, those violations were just ratified — again — by Israeli voters.

Obama’s challenge, then, is to craft an entirely new approach to dealing with Tel Aviv. It’s time to rethink the old assumptions, driven by pro-Israel lobbies and by outdated Cold War strategies, that called for providing Israel with uncritical support, diplomatic impunity, guaranteed military protection, and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in military aid.

Those have been the key features of the U.S.-Israeli relationship for at least 48 years, and they have failed.

They’ve failed to bring Israel’s nuclear arsenal under international inspection or to make Israel sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. They’ve failed to bring about an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, its rejection of the Palestinians’ internationally guaranteed right of return, or its discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel. They’ve failed to encourage an Israel that respects human rights and accepts equality for all as an essential national goal.

As Obama considers the possibility — so long in coming — of reducing its diplomatic protection of Israel at the United Nations and elsewhere, his administration should keep in mind that litany of failures.

The U.S. relationship with Israel has sustained and cosseted an over-armed, nuclearized state that not only expropriates and occupies other peoples’ lands and deprives 20 percent of its own citizens of crucial national rights, but has also worked deliberately to derail U.S. and international negotiations with Iran. The United States can no longer welcome Israeli leaders who rely on openly racist provocations to win votes in support of apartheid policies or foolish wars.

A Normal Relationship

It’s time for an entirely new connection — one based not on a “special relationship,” but on the normal ties Washington shares with most other countries.

A normal relationship means reconsidering why U.S. taxpayers send $3.1 billion to Israel every year — that’s 55 percent of all U.S. military aid — when Israel, according to the IMF, is the 25th wealthiest country in the world.

It means asking why we don’t enforce the Leahy Law, which prohibits sending arms to any military unit known to commit human rights violations, when even the State Department’sown annual reports document patterns of Israeli violations. It means replacing our current “we-will-protect-Israel-no-matter-what-it-does” strategy with a new commitment to reaching a solution between Israelis and Palestinians based on human rights, international law, and equality for all.

A normal relationship, in short, means ending U.S. complicity in Israel’s violations.

Our own progress against racism in the United States remains too recent, too fragile, and too incomplete to allow our government to provide support to those relying on racist appeals to win elections abroad — especially when they include the leader of the U.S.-armed, U.S.-funded, and U.S.-protected “only democracy” in the Middle East.

Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

http://www.ips-dc.org/jim-crow-in-the-holy-land/feed/1From Gold Country to the Golden Trianglehttp://www.ips-dc.org/from-gold-country-to-the-golden-triangle/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=from-gold-country-to-the-golden-triangle
http://www.ips-dc.org/from-gold-country-to-the-golden-triangle/#commentsMon, 23 Mar 2015 15:00:50 +0000Manuel Perez-Rochahttp://www.ips-dc.org/?p=37334Three environmental and human rights heroes came to Washington from gold country in El Salvador this week to protest in front of the oversized World Bank headquarters, at the southern corner of what is known as the “Golden Triangle” in Washington, DC. One hundred-plus people from a range of organizations from the AFL-CIO to Casa denounced a secret tribunal housed in the Bank that is getting ready to rule on a case that could determine the future of El Salvador’s water supply.

The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), housed at the World Bank, is hearing the case, which was filed by a Canadian company, Pacific Rim. That company (which was recently purchased by Australian-based Oceana Gold) is suing El Salvador for hundreds of millions of dollars because the government has not granted the company a permit for a gold mining project. Because of concerns that cyanide-based gold mining could pollute the country’s major river system, the government has placed a de facto moratorium on all mining projects.

At a rally in front of the World Bank, Vidalina Morales, a member of the Salvadoran Roundtable against Metallic Mining, said “We are not willing to let the Salvadoran government pay one single dollar. It is the mining company who should pay El Salvador for the violation of environmental and human rights. These courts only defend the interests of large corporations, not the people of El Salvador. Imagine what you could do with that money in El Salvador for social programs to alleviate poverty.”

Elvis Zavala and Cristina Starr, two journalists with the independent radio station Radio Victoria, also attended the rally. Zavala noted that he has received death threats for his reporting on the Pacific Rim dispute.

A diversity of faith, labor, and environmental leaders, as well as representatives of the Salvadoran community in the Washington region, joined the rally in solidarity with the people of El Salvador who are fighting the Pacific Rim case. They also used the opportunity to draw attention to the investment rules in trade agreements that allow private corporations to sue governments.

The Obama administration is trying to expand these corporate rights in new agreements with Asia (the Trans-Pacific Partnership) and Europe (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), and is pushing to “Fast Track” these controversial deals through Congress. As Bill Waren, from Friends of the Earth US, said “this is a perfect example of what can happen when we prioritize free trade over the rights of people and the planet.”

Cathy Feingold, the AFL-CIO’s Director of International Affairs, said that U.S. workers stand in solidarity with the people of El Salvador and against free trade agreements that allow these abuses.

A climactic moment during the rally took place when the World Bank’s Civil Society Adviser came out to receive 174,000 signatures, collected from all over the world, urging Pacific Rim/Oceana Gold to drop the suit against El Salvador and asking the World Bank to examine whether ICSID and such “investor-state” cases are consistent with the Bank’s official mission of combating poverty.

On March 21, the three Salvadoran heroes received an award from the Washington Ethical Society, the Institute for Policy Studies and others, for their courage, commitment and service in bringing international attention to the issue of precious metal mining in developing countries worldwide.

Top executives at Dollar General acknowledged a tightening labor market and the need to stay competitive when it comes to attracting and retaining employees.

So why did they stop short of raising their own workers’ wages?

As Fortune.com recently pointed out, dollar stores exploded during the Great Recession as more Americans suffered financially and depended on extreme bargains to buy anything, including food.

These stores (Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar) are smaller-scale than Walmart but have more stores overall. Their business model is to focus on items that cost between $1 and $5. They only have a few employees per store, but they keep labor costs to a minimum to support their low prices.

They also target the lowest-income shoppers. Dollar General CEO Richard Dreiling explained to analysts on a recent conference call that his company was still doing well because his “core customers are still far from being out of the woods” despite other indicators that Americans are doing much better financially.

Did Dollar General’s CEO just admit that a core group of financially distressed Americans is built into the success of his company?

Um, yeah.

Maybe Dollar General decided not to raise wages because that would support a trend that is against the company’s self-interest?

Regardless, at least Dollar General is doing something about erratic schedules, which has been elevated in recent campaigns as an issue that many workers care about deeply.

But it’s still odd that Dollar General, the giant of the extreme discount retailers, would refuse to raise wages while acknowledging the tightening labor market that Walmart’s decision helped exacerbate.

One thing is clear: discount retailers are finally feeling the pressure from workers’ demands. And as those demands become greater and greater, extreme discount retailers like Dollar General are going to get squeezed.

In traditional Japanese culture, a samurai without a master is known as a ronin.

The most popular tale featuring these leaderless samurai is the 18th-century Chusingura. It tells of a feudal lord who must commit ritual suicide after assaulting the court official who had insulted him. Of the lord’s several hundred retainers, 47 loyal samurai plot their revenge on the haughty court official. After two years of scheming and subterfuge, they put their plan into motion. They surround the court official’s mansion, kill a number of his guards, locate the wretched man, and cut off his head.

Revenge complete: a head for a head. But since the shogun had ruled out revenge in this case, the 47 ronin had knowingly defied the government. They’d felt a need to obey a much deeper tradition in Japanese culture: to honor their former master. They also knew that they’d have to pay a price for discharging this debt of obligation.

Except for the messenger who delivered the news of the court official’s murder, the ronin are all ordered to follow the example of their master. They, too, commit ritual suicide. Their graves at the Senkaku temple in the heart of Tokyo are even today a destination for pilgrims. The Chusingura has taught generations of Japanese that obligation must always trump political expediency.

This venerable Japanese tale of treachery, honor, and revenge has been performed many times on stage, both with puppets (bunraku) and with actors (kabuki). But a new production, modernized and updated, has now been remounted here in Washington, DC. Even though the show has gotten some terrible reviews, I feel obligated to add my own critical voice.

In this new American production of the Japanese classic, 47 Republican senators play the roles of the 47 ronin. They too deliberately defy the shogun, played with equanimity by President Obama. But the American ronin are out to kill a policy, not a person.

Led by upstart Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton, who earned his samurai sword on the field of battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 47 Republican roninsend a letter to the distant shogunate of Iran. The epistle, which comes at a critical moment in the negotiations to roll back Iran’s nuclear program, offers two arguments. President Obama doesn’t really have the authority to make a binding nuclear deal, the ronin maintain. And even if such a deal were concluded, a future president or a future Congress could quickly undo it.

These rogue senators are not interested in obeying the letter of the law: They prefer the law of their letter. Nor do they feel any need to show deference to their commander-in-chief. Like their Japanese counterparts, they too believe that they’re acting toward some greater purpose. But unlike the Chusingura, they have no desire to pay the political cost for this treachery — the loss not of their heads but of their offices. But it may well come to that.

This is no laughing matter. Still, as Marx once said, history repeats — first as tragedy and then as farce. So, what does the farce of the 47 Republican ronin teach us about Capitol Hill politics today?

Out for Revenge

The Republican Party now controls Congress. Although the party leadership has done plenty to undermine the Obama administration’s foreign policy over the years — even where the interests intersect, like drone strikes and military spending — it’s now shifted into full-on combat mode.

The first salvo in this new round of conflict was the invitation from House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — without any consultation with the White House or the minority party — to address both houses of Congress.

But the letter of the 47 ronin is a far more serious act of revenge. These Republican senators believe that their master — neoconservatism — received a deadly series of insults from President Obama when he took office. The previous shogun, George W. Bush, had made regime change in Iran a priority: putting the country in the “axis of evil,” initiating a secret program to disrupt the country’s nuclear program, adding more sanctions to an already restrictive regime.

Obama, after a brief flirtation with Stuxnet and the Green Revolution, reversed course. The culmination of negotiations with Iran came in November 2013 with an interim agreement that the United States would relax somewhat the sanctions regime in exchange for a freeze on Iran’s nuclear program. At least with respect to Iran, neoconservatism has sustained several punishing blows.

Both sides have kept to their side of the bargain. But the Republican ronin, leaderless after the dethroning of the neoconservatives, have vowed to enact their revenge. They can’t kill the shogun, but they can attempt to kill his policy.

Their letter is designed to disrupt the negotiations and revert to the earlier regime-change approach to Iran. Cotton himself has urged more sanctions, more preparations for war, and more weapons to Israel. Any day now he’ll break into the neocons’ favorite Beach Boys song,Barbara Ann, with a chorus retrofitted for their political purposes — “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” — just as John McCain sang it in 2007. Neocon Joshua Muravchik has already called the tune with his recent op-ed dismissing sanctions in favor of all-out war.

The backlash against the ronin’s letter has been enormous — from the media, from politicians, even from the Republican camp.

Not only did former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson criticize the letter, he even suggestedthat it “raises questions about the Republican majority’s capacity to govern.” The Iranian leadership, judging from Ayatollah Khamenei’s response, has come to a similar conclusion.

Fortunately the Iranians know a thing or two about how American politics operate. Indeed, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who received a Ph.D. in international law and policy at the University of Denver, probably knows more about law and politics than Tom Cotton does. Meanwhile, the negotiators soldier on, despite the intervention of the ronin, toward an end-of-March deadline to work out a framework agreement.

Subterfuge might play a role in this drama, just as it did in the old Japanese story. After all, the letter has made the provocative bill authored by Tennessee Republican Bob Corker — which would require congressional approval of any deal the Obama administration secures — seem like a “sensible” bipartisan effort. Before the letter, the bill lacked enough votes for a veto-proof majority. But now sponsors think they can peel away another couple Democrats to get the majority they need.

The Chusingura is not supposed to culminate in the victory celebration of the ronin and their reelection in 2016. But this is America, the land of “happy” endings. What was the last play you saw on Broadway that ended with the mass suicide of all the principal actors? Even though I haven’t seen it, I’m pretty sure that’s not the finale to The Lion King.

But this is Congress, not Broadway. The ronin should not celebrate quite so soon.

Puppet Play

In Japanese puppet plays, or bunraku, the audience can see the puppet masters on stage. They’re dressed in black like ninjas, and they work against a black background. But even as you suspend your disbelief, you know they’re there.

The current U.S. production of Chusingura seems like it’s a live-action play. But a little investigation reveals that a number of wealthy puppet masters are at work behind the scenes, manipulating principal characters like Tom Cotton. The Arkansas politician has attracted major league support from the most conservative members of the Israel lobby: billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, media maven Bill Kristol, wealthy anti-Iran campaigner Paul Singer.

The presence of these puppet masters helps to explain the motivation of the 47 Republicanronin. Remember, the heart of the Chusingura is the reasoning of the ronin. They’re sacrificing their lives not just for their dead master but for an ideal: honor. The motivation of the 47 Republican ronin is less pure. They know who signs checks for their reelection campaigns. They know that anti-Obama posturing plays well with their constituents. They know that, at a time of economic growth and low unemployment, they have to destroy the foreign policy accomplishments the president hopes can burnish his record and that of the Democratic Party.

To be clear, the Republican ronin are probably not guilty of violating the Logan Act, which forbids U.S. citizens from negotiating with foreign governments. The 47 senators were not negotiating with Iran. That’s the last thing on their minds: They want nothing to do with Iran.

Rather, the Republican senators are guilty of a more serious trespass. They’re prioritizing the national interests of Israel over those of the United States.

Actually, it’s not even the national interests of Israel — it’s the perceived interests of that portion of the political elite that supports Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to sabotage the negotiations with Iran. Israel’s ruling elites are divided on this issue. After all, even former Mossad chiefs disagree with Netanyahu’s position on Iran, and the spy agency’scurrent position is that the additional sanctions Congress is considering would deep-six the negotiations.

The ronin perhaps think that they’ve backed the right horse. After elections this week in Israel, Netanyahu will again head up the government. And the last mid-term elections in the United States delivered Congress into the hands of the Republican Party.

But on the Iran issue, the Obama administration has the backing of a large majority of the American electorate, including 65 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of independents who support direct negotiations. If an agreement comes out of the current talks — and negotiators are doing their damnedest to work through the details — Obama will simultaneously strengthen the hands of reformers in Iran, isolate Netanyahu, and marginalize his congressional opponents.

Cotton and company are not going to fall on their swords as a result. But they may pay a price at the polls in 2016 if their opposition to successful negotiations becomes a political millstone. If that happens, their letter — and the larger strategy to push the United States into a war with Iran — will end up as just so much Beltway kabuki: colorful theater with zero impact on policy.

I’m embarrassed to admit I’m one of the few people in Washington who has never watched House of Cards. But this sorry state of affairs is soon about to change.

That’s because this hot Netflix show has just delivered me a pleasant surprise. A new episode uses figures from a report I co-authored last year on one of the wonkiest of all issues: the tax deductibility of executive “performance pay.”

As explained in this Yahoo Finance article and video, Season 3, Episode 8 features a scene where — mild spoilers — a presidential candidate fires up a crowd by bashing Walmart over its low wages. The candidate then goes on to add: “Walmart’s top executives have reaped almost $300 million in tax-deductible performance pay over the last six years. That needs to stop!”

Huh? That was the reaction of Yahoo Finance reporter (and House of Cards fan) Aaron Task. He called me after his curiosity prompted him to trace that line to a report we co-published last year with Americans for Tax Fairness.

Indeed, my IPS colleagues and I have been going after this “performance pay” loophole for about 15 years now.

Here’s how the loophole works: A 1993 amendment to the tax code capped the total executive pay corporations can deduct off their taxes at no more than $1 million. But so-called “performance” pay is exempted. So corporations can simply declare stock-based rewards they lavish on executives “performance-based” and deduct them as a basic business expense.

The more corporations pay their CEO, the less they pay in taxes. And the rest of us get stuck making up the difference.

Several legislative efforts are now pending to fix this perverse incentive for overpaying executives. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) recently introduced the “CEO/Employee Pay Fairness Act,” a bill that would deny corporate tax deductions for any executive compensation over $1 million — unless the firm raises salaries for lower-level workers.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) has championed the Income Equity Act. This bill sets a deductibility cap of $500,000 or 25 times a company’s median worker compensation.

Are your eyes glazed over now? Well, that’s why we need popular media like House of Cards to make this issue sexy.

Or better yet, maybe one of our real-life 2016 presidential candidates would like to take this on?

Poor people, especially people of color, face a far greater risk of being fined, arrested, and even incarcerated for minor offenses than other Americans. A broken taillight, an unpaid parking ticket, a minor drug offense, sitting on a sidewalk, or sleeping in a park can all result in jail time. In this report, we seek to understand the multi-faceted, growing phenomenon of the “criminalization of poverty.”

In many ways, this phenomenon is not new: The introduction of public assistance programs gave rise to prejudices against beneficiaries and to systemic efforts to obstruct access to the assistance.

This form of criminalizing poverty — racial profiling or the targeting of poor black and Latina single mothers trying to access public assistance — is a relatively familiar reality. Less well-known known are the new and growing trends which increase this criminalization of being poor that affect or will affect hundreds of millions of Americans. These troubling trends are eliminating their chances to get out of poverty and access resources that make a safe and decent life possible.

In this report we will summarize these realities, filling out the true breadth and depth of this national crisis. The key elements we examine are:

the targeting of poor people with fines and fees for misdemeanors, and the resurgence of debtors’ prisons – the imprisonment of people unable to pay debts resulting from the increase in fines and fees;

mass incarceration of poor ethnic minorities for non-violent offenses, and the barriers to employment and re-entry into society once they have served their sentences;

excessive punishment of poor children that creates a “school-to-prison pipeline”;

increase in arrests of homeless people and people feeding the homeless, and criminalizing life-sustaining activities such as sleeping in public when no shelter is available; and

confiscating what little resources and property poor people might have through “civil asset forfeiture.”